Smart Infrastructure through Community Engagement, Multidisciplinary Team Building, and Mentoring
Smart Infrastructure through Community Engagement, Multidisciplinary Team Building, and Mentoring
This summer the University of New Mexico continues their work on wireless smart sensors, advanced human-machine interfaces, and smart infrastructure at the Smart Management of Infrastructure Laboratory. There are some exciting updates on what is happening with a group of talented, out of the box individuals committed to innovation, research, and safety of our communities. The New Mexico Consortium is supporting interdisciplinary collaborations that are creating new technologies that will transform the way we prepare, measure, and predict wildfires, respond to flooding, or measuring train vibrations with a collaboration with the Federal Railroad Administration and the Engineering Student Service Center of UNM.
On June PhD students representing SMILab in the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) Annual Conference. Ali Khorasani and Mahsa Sanei served at EMI as chairs of two different committee sessions: Ali chaired a mini symposium on “CIVIC Transportation and Resilient Solutions Towards Smart and Connected Communities” which summarized work related to the collaboration with High Water Mark LLC of Bernalillo and Ohkay Owingeh. It was well received, and the audience was impressed with the fabrication of sensors by youth in the paper “Human-disaster interfaces enabled by Low-cost Efficient Wireless Intelligent Sensors (LEWIS)”. Mahsa chaired a mini symposium investigating “Assessing Human-Infrastructure Interactions and their Performance,” and presenting the paper “Enhanced Human Interfaces for Rebar Inspection using RGBD-equipped UAV – Field Application” with work in collaboration with Los Alamos County, using UAVs for enhanced construction site operations, another project from New Mexico that impressed the audience. In this project, Morgan Merrill, then in high school, started her career as structural engineer assisting Mahsa and Ali at the field at the job site at White Rock. At this session, Kaveh also presented the paper “Enhancing the Blind-with-Buildings Interaction Using a Digital Controller with Augmented Auditory Feedback” which investigates control methods for human-machine interfaces.
SMILab is creating a new advanced indoor dynamics laboratory where we will test new theories, experiments, and sensing with new approaches to sensing, control, and human-in-the-loop. They are installing new optical tables, shakers, Vicon cameras, and will advance our brand-new research with a brand-new laboratory, supported by the Office of Naval Research, stay tuned!
Below is a video by Odey showing the effect of active control for earthquakes. The figure on the left does not have the active damper on, the same earthquake on the right to the same structure shows how much less the building vibrates when is controlled. Great job Odey Yousef, and looking forward to more advanced progress in dynamics, disasters, and sensors.
Finally, the team has been working with the Engineering Student Success Center and the Rail Runner and last Friday June 9th they taught the popular course: build your LEWIS while taking the railrunner to Santa Fe” which is always fun and connects technology, ideas, and STEM in the train. We will do more this summer, stay tuned, and when you take the train and see middle schoolers with cables, computers, and sensors, you know you are safe.
